Well, once again the knowledge of what an artist became later has tainted their early work for me. My only working CD player is in the kitchen, so when I cook and clean up, I go to my busted 300-CD changer in the living room (World's most expensive CD storage system!) and pull a CD out. Yesterday it was the Waterboys' Greatest Hits.
Now, I was never a huge fan or anything, but I did like the Fisherman's Blues album. So I cued it up and was digging "The Whole of the Moon," thinking, you know, this band had an interesting celtic-wall-of-sound thing going on, like Phil Spector drunk on Guinness, (or possibly Caledonian 80/-) or something, and then this line pops out at me: "I saw a rain-dirty valley/you saw Brigadoon." I mean, a Brigadoon reference? You have an otherwise beautiful song expressing your profound love and admiration for someone, and you throw in the name of a hokey kailyard musical? (Yeah, I said kailyard. 'Cause I studied Scottish Literature at the U of E, bitches! Put that in your Scots Quair and smoke it!)
Now, when that song first came out, and even through Fisherman's Blues, I heard that line and thought, well, there's a lyrical hiccup in an otherwise fine song. But knowing that Mike Scott went on to write the execrable "A Man is in Love," (A definite worst miss that inexplicably ends the greatest hits album) and other horrors, that line just seems like an ominous portent of cheesiness to come. It's harder to overlook the bad moments in the good songs, because they just seem like sad harbingers of decline.
Oh well. "Fisherman's Blues" is still one hell of a song, though, even with all that over-the-top whooping.
